Saturday, December 20, 2008

Limited Free Speech Doesn't Work

The General Assembly of the United Nations has once again passed a non binding resolution condemning religious discrimination while idly saying that freedom of speech may be subject to limitations. This is the fourth year in a row the General Assembly has passed such a resolution, this year with a reduced vote (actually it only got a plurality, not a majority this time around).

This resolution is mainly backed by Islamic states and opposed by western states. Not a surprising division on the issue. The Islamic states backing the resolution say they don't want to limit free speech, they just want to stop things like the Dutch Mohammed cartoons from a few years ago.

The cognitive dissonance in such a statement is amazing. They don't want to limit speech, they just want to limit speech that upsets them. It's almost as if they don't get the idea that freedom of speech includes speech that upsets them.

Freedoms like speech are one of the things I tend to get absolutist about. Individual liberties are the foundation on which the rest of society is built. If you undermine those, you undermine society.

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